Tracing food items through processing for recordkeeping is known in the art. This is of great importance when food contamination is discovered somewhere in the supply chain. The ability to catalog food products through processing, such as mother origin of livestock, which slaughterhouse was used and the name of the worker can also help with maintaining good quality assurance and minimize the damage in case of any contamination. Moreover, after the slaughtering of the livestock each piece of the animal can further be tracked and catalogued to produce traceable information regarding the origin of the food item as well as the process it has gone through during the processing in the processing plant. The sequential nature of the food processing makes it easy to keep track of this information until the final product goes through a packing process.
WO0191565 discloses a process and an application for handling information in relation to meat being conveyed through a number of processing stations. The information is used to trace the processing history of a piece of meat, including its origination. The ability to trace the processing history may be used e.g. in order to trace back sources of contamination and for verification of the status and quality, weight etc. of the meat. The information is furthermore useful for the workers processing the meat at the stations or useful for the control and management of the meat processing plant.
WO03077662 discloses a method and system for monitoring the processing of items such as pieces of meat, including carcasses of pigs, calves, beeves and so on, also poultry, fish etc., where use is made of identification for the individual animal and/or the individual item or part item. The processing involves cutting-up into smaller pieces, inasmuch as a registration of identification for a piece of meat, a carcass or the like is affected. The piece of meat is allocated to one of a multiple of workstations, inasmuch as identification for the said workstation is registered and the allocated piece of meat is processed at the workstation while use is made of visual instruction. Hereafter, a further transport is established of the whole or parts of the yield from the cutting-up of the allocated piece of meat, such as one or more cuts. The further transport is similarly registered so that traceability is established for the pieces of meat, including also for the cuts.
Most food processing methods include shuffling of items during the processing, which may sometimes be from multiple processing lines. Therefore, the traceable information is often lost during packing, the final stage of the processing as well known and traceable items at the in-feed to a selection or packing process are mingled together with other pieces. The finished and packed product may be traced from the warehouse or distributor to the retailers. This normally results in food being recalled in a large quantity when food contamination is discovered due to lack of traceability of the items.
Prior art methods and systems for tracing food items through processing plants take advantage of the sequential nature of food processing. However, when it comes to tasks in the processing which are not sequential in nature: For example distributing items to a de-boning station based on real-time information such as availability of de-boners, demand, quality of work etc. Or simply the fact that we want to select four slices of meat from four different cutters to make a packing of four slices which are exactly the same size, shape and color. When it comes to these non-sequential processing decisions the sequential advantage is lost. Unfortunately, prior art systems do not adequately address this challenge, when it comes to non-sequential processing tracing information are lost.